Rockefeller Foundation: We will lift 1 billion people out of poverty over a decade

We needed to do something bold together. So we both committed $500 million, and our initial $1 billion is intended to unlock perhaps 10 to $20 billion of private investment. We've identified partners and projects all around the world, and we are off to the races. We believe that our mission is to move a billion people out of poverty over the course of a decade using renewable energy technology, and we think that's now possible. Welcome to this special English edition of der große Neustadt, a German podcast series by Zabilla Barton, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who, inspired by the World Economic Forum's great reset initiative, are committed to making our world smarter, greener and fairer. Today I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. His organization, NC Ikea Foundation, decided to join forces and set up a $1 billion global platform to fight climate change and energy poverty, a platform that aims to reduce 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and to empower 1 billion people with distributed renewable energy, which makes it an historic enterprise, because it's the single largest distributed renewable energy initiative. Hello, Dr. Rajiv Shah in New York. Congratulations, and how did you make this happen? Good morning, thank you for having me. Well, you know, the Rockefeller Foundation for more than 100 years has looked to explore how the frontiers of science, technology and innovation can really be used to best lift up most of humanity and many of those who are otherwise left behind. And we have in our past invested in modern medicine and public health towards that purpose. We helped invest in agricultural science and research to power a green revolution 50 years ago. And today when we look to the future and say, how can you help the most people in the world lift up their hopes and dreams and live a life of dignity and productivity? We believe the answer to that question is providing renewable energy to the nearly one billion people who still frankly live without any real access to electricity and therefore are isolated from the global economy. So this is an effort we have been pursuing for more than a decade. We see some new possibilities made possible by technology and partnership. We have found amazing partners like the IKEA Foundation to match our commitment. And we suspect many, many others will join this important platform. And as the world tries to fight off climate change, we should do it in a way that once and for all ends extreme poverty. And we think we have a path forward to achieve that goal. Yeah. You mentioned that you do that together with the IKEA Foundation. How did you find each other? Well, both Rockefeller and IKEA have worked on issues of global poverty for many years. So we've done smaller efforts together, but their amazing CEO, Per Heganus, approached us and we approached them with this opportunity. And we both just felt that, you know, this is the moment in which we have to really go big if we're going to make a big imprint on the world. COVID-19 has shown us we are all deeply interconnected. The consequences of climate change are so apparent in Europe and Germany and the United States, all around the world. And we felt we needed to do something bold together. So we both committed $500 million and our initial $1 billion is intended to unlock perhaps 10 to $20 billion of private investment. We've identified partners and projects all around the world. And we are off to the races. We believe that our mission is to move a billion people out of poverty over the course of a decade using renewable energy technology. And we think that's now possible. Yeah, that is a breathtaking number. I was thinking about that you were saying your aim is to reduce 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. How, if I want to imagine how that works, how do you do that? What technology do you use? Sure, let me just give you an example. Before COVID hit, I spent some time in a rural village in a state called Bihar in India. And it's one of the poorest states in India. I was walking through the village with my team and actually my daughter had joined the visit. And in fact, as happens almost every day around dusk, the government provided electricity just stopped, just went out. All of a sudden all the lights turned off, all the businesses that were open and serving food or selling carpentry goods or doing other things just immediately had to stop functioning and people started going back towards their homes. And then a few moments later, because of a Rockefeller Foundation supported solar mini-grid that we had installed near that village, all the lights went back on and power restarted. People reopened their food stalls and their businesses and economic activity continued to buzz. And that's really the difference. I mean, without electricity, you cannot have any viable economy. And without reliable electricity, all these small businesses around the world use diesel generators and rely on dirty coal connected to large scale grids that often fail to serve them. And so this is just a much better cleaner approach that relies on, in this case, solar panels, a battery system, some remote artificial intelligence-based management, smart meters and small mini-grids. And it makes all the difference in the world to that community. And do you work with local companies or you've got already technology companies you work with? Absolutely, local, national and global. In India, we serve almost more than 700,000 customers today. We work with some small-scale entrepreneurial companies. Our biggest partnership is with Tata Power in India, probably India's largest power company. And they've collaborated with us in a joint venture to build 10,000 of these rural mini-grids and to reach more than 10 million people who currently live in the dark. And that's gonna transform the lives of big parts of rural India. And we're excited to have a big collaboration with a major company. In Africa, we have local partners and national partners and international partners as well. And the same is true in Latin America and East Asia. So the strategy is anyone who can be part of this mission, we need you to be part of this mission. If you're a battery technology manufacturer, please reach out to us. We need low-cost energy storage to bring a billion people onto renewable platforms. If you're a service provider, we can work with you. If you're a financier or a bank, we need your capital. These are gonna be productive businesses and more important, they're gonna lift up a billion people out of poverty and protect our climate future. Yeah, yeah. By when do you start? Well, this particular project, actually the Rockefeller Foundation started about nine years ago. And so what happened was we collected data and we started serving customers and we started exploring how to create a business model that works. Initially, when the team built this system, they had to charge customers 80 or 90 cents a kilowatt hour. That was the cost of energy production. But because the technology has gotten so much better in that time, that's now down to 22, 24 cents a kilowatt hour. And we think it'll come down another 30% in the next year as we achieve some scale. So we have been doing this for a while, but the effort to embrace big, bold new partners like Tata and Ikea and so many others, that's really been just the last six months or last one year actually. And we just think now is the time to scale this up so that it can be a big part of the global solution. Yeah, yeah. Because you keep on mentioning that you want to improve the life of one billion people, which is a massive number. That's probably also the amount of people which are right now and living in total poverty. Can we talk a bit about creating access to clean and reliable power and electricity and maybe also to water? Are you doing some project there as well? Well, absolutely. And frankly, they're all interconnected. If you walk through a slum outside of Nairobi in Kenya or outside of Addis in Ethiopia or outside of Mumbai in India, you'll see millions of people living in very poor conditions. And you'll see that mostly they have established these informal connections where they try to tap into the government energy grid and effectively take the power without really being officially served by the utilities because you need power to purify water, you need power to keep food refrigerated and you need power to be economically productive in any community, you need it for light just so women and girls can walk around at night and be safe from violence and sexual abuse. So it's so critically needed. And yes, our intention is to make sure that the people who have access to the clean, renewable distributed energy that we'll now be able to provide that they can use that for water purification, for food storage, for productivity improvement if they're in a rural community and they depend on family agriculture to earn income and feed their families. All of the activities of modern life are made possible by energy and electricity. And as you note, there's still, we live in a world where 800 million people live in the dark and other billion, billion and a half people have very erratic access to power so businesses really can't grow and are too constrained in that context. And we're convinced that this effort is the single greatest thing we can do to alleviate extreme poverty and suffering around the world. When you allocate now all the money and technology how do you monitor the, yeah, the development? Well, very, very carefully, you know that's such a good question because I have been a part of this work to help address poverty and vulnerability and ill health and suffering in emerging and developing economies for a long time. And the single most important thing I've learned is you have to measure results with discipline and report on them with clarity. That's how we know, for example, that a small business in a rural community served by our renewable electrification projects are able to grow their businesses 50% in the first year and add two to three employees on average, almost right away. That's how we know that rates of gender-based violence go down when there's lighting and public lighting in communities all around the world. So we carefully measure the results of this work. We also measure whether or not low income and very poor families will pay for power and electricity because you could say, gosh, they're very poor. Why would they pay for this? And the reality is 97% of our customers pay their bills fully, which makes this an absolutely productive commercial market once we get it going. And we know that because we measure and collect the data. Yeah. You also mentioned in the announcement that you want to unlock further sustainable models. Can you talk me through it? Sure. Well, if you look around the world, emerging economies and developing countries have as their priority first and foremost, the need to lift up the living standards of their people. This is even more true now with COVID-19 having pushed almost half a billion people back under an expanded definition of the poverty line. And so we have a simple vision, which is we need to help lift up that very large global community in a sustainable way. And what that means is helping energy sectors transition to renewable electrification. It means committing ourselves to reach the people who are not reached with current electricity, but to do so with renewable sources. It means to reshape food and agriculture systems so they can sequester carbon and produce more nutritious food, but also food that is more manageable for our planet and more of a careful stewardship of land resources. And across the board, these are the types of things we have to do to both lift people up and do it in a way that protects our planet. Because too many times, people assume that the responsibilities of addressing climate change are really only on those countries that have been the big industrial economies. And they do carry the large burden of fighting climate change. But if we're going to succeed as a globe, we have to do it together. And there has to be some reason for emerging and developing economies to be passionate about this mission. And we think this is the reason, is do it in a way that lifts people up. Yeah. Do you see right now more passion for rescuing the planet? Well, absolutely. I think Europe has of course been a leader in that. And if you look at how nations have invested in the economic recovery to COVID-19, you see in the EU in particular, commitments to use 30 plus percent of the fiscal stimulus resources being invested, specifically for greening the economy. I think the United States is seeking to do the same thing now under President Biden. And the challenge now is saying, okay, how do we make that a global effort? How do we get resources and technology and know-how and partnership and collaboration, not just in a handful of wealthier nations, but make it accessible to every country and make this a global mission? That's what our energy transition platform aims to do in the energy sector. We think there are other platforms that are going to be necessary in food and land use and in other areas like industrial processes where how you develop your economy says a lot about how sustainable our planet will be over time. Yeah, yeah. Your global platform will oversee the combined funds. How does it work? Well, our global platform for energy transition and ending energy poverty will include grant resources from philanthropies like Rockefeller and IKEA and hopefully many others. It will include investment commitments from development financed institutions. Most major industrial nations have institutions set up to promote investment, private sector investment in global development objectives. So those institutions are right now making billions of dollars of commitments to this platform. And that's going to be critically necessary. And then we'll need commercial capital commitments. And I think we will achieve that because most of the major banks and investment groups we speak to are seeking to make investments in emerging markets and in energy technologies and energy transitions. They know that this is a business for the future but it's hard to find deal flow. It's hard to be exposed without partners who have a long track record like Rockefeller of doing this work and we can help take some of the risk out for a commercial investment. So really the platform will aggregate capital from all of those sources, which is why I do believe it'll be in the tens of billions of dollars in terms of commitments raised and ultimately we'll measure success not by the dollars we raise but by the people we serve and whether we do in fact move up one billion people out of energy poverty in a decade. Yeah, that's very encouraging. And I learned during all my conversations with big corporations and the UN and so on that everybody was doing their part but also everybody mentioned there is nobody in the driver's seat, right? The UN is doing their thing but they will work with organizations and companies together on some projects. Then the World Economic Forum is doing things, you are doing things, other foundations. So do you see yourself or the Rockefeller Foundation here in the driver's seat for the fight against climate change? Well, I think we see ourselves as a partner who can bring people together to solve some of the toughest challenges the world faces and ending energy poverty and addressing climate change simultaneously certainly is one of those challenges. And the reason I say we can bring people together versus being in the driver's seat is at the end of the day, if there's one thing I've learned is that if you're really gonna make a dent at this type of scale on a big global challenge you need everyone to be in the driver's seat. You need companies to be partnering on the platform and being willing to imagine new possibilities. I don't think the Tata team was thinking about a business that served the very poor in India until we worked with them for many years and they jointly created this vision. You need investors to be really fully vested on the platform so they can say, look, this might look a little riskier than a typical transaction in a developed economy but we have a long-term commitment to a global transformation here and we're gonna put our capital in alongside other partners like the International Finance Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation that can help take some of the risk out in that transaction. And frankly, we need young people and technologists, people to dream up new energy storage solutions so the cost can come down even more. We need governments to participate, to provide subsidies where necessary but also to make sure that solar panels are accessible to the operators and they can build out at a greater pace and scale. So you need everyone participating together and building these multi-stakeholder partnerships is just something we do. We've been doing it for more than a hundred years. It's the only solution we've ever found to big global challenges like changing the nature of global food production or transforming the fight against diseases around the world. Yeah, I noticed that you worked for President Obama. You served as a chief scientist as far as I remember. That's right, isn't it? Yeah, I both served as the chief scientist in the Department of Agriculture and then I ran the US Agency for International Development for President Obama and was proud to do so for many years. When you think back to the Obama time and now, the shift in the sinking in ecosystems, how did it change over time? Well, during the Obama years, I think there was a real commitment amongst global leaders to multilateral action. So you had the Paris Accords come out of, first Copenhagen and then Paris come out of that commitment to work together. You had bigger investments to scale up things like the global alliance for vaccines and immunization and the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and malaria. You had new initiatives that we created, one called Power Africa to help expand energy access in Africa because we knew that was really the only way to create stability across that continent over the long term and that was in everyone's interest. And ultimately you had a shared commitment, 192 countries signing on to end extreme poverty because it is now feasible to do that through the sustainable development goals. And then I think after that, and you've written about this and spoken about this, populism took hold in many nations, including in the United States. And there's been a great stepping away from that basic idea that to solve the world's toughest problems, we need to work together. And I think that's extremely challenging. So now with President Biden, America is back, we're once again committed to global problem solving. And I think you see in the actions that he is taking and his administration is taking, that that renewal of American cooperative spirit is helping to re-energize some of these efforts. And it's critically needed right now. We need to vaccinate everybody across the planet from COVID-19, one of the efforts our foundation is focused on and we need to fight climate change, but do it in a way that lifts up the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us, which is the other objective we're deeply committed to. Because you talked about the sustainable development goals and the Paris Agreement that leads me straight to your thoughts you have pointed out in Fortune magazine, where you state that we need a new Bretton Woods to restart the global economy and that the G20 countries should put the old organizations to a much better use. Can you go in some more detail? Well, you know, let me go back as you remember after actually near the end of World War II, Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt came together and created something called the Atlantic Charter, which was a statement of values basically saying, we understand how we got here and let's be proactive in taking some steps so that economies and countries can cooperate more fully and therefore avoid future conflict. And coming out of that were so many important initiatives that actually achieved that goal. You've spoken about a global Marshall plan, but the Marshall plan itself was perhaps the best embodiment of the idea that if we help each other stand back up, we can build bridges instead of walls, we can share in our economic prosperity and we can stabilize our geopolitics. And so today when you look at, and the other big effort of course was the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, ultimately the regional development banks that played such an important role in stabilizing globalization over many decades. Our argument today is that COVID-19 is the most destructive thing we've seen on a global basis since World War II. And we need our leaders to react in the same way now. Now while we're in the midst of fighting COVID-19, especially around the world, let's come together and have a new COVID charter. Let's reimagine what the Bretton Woods institutions can do to help achieve an equitable recovery for everybody, not just those that live in wealthy countries or those whose nations are able to borrow and invest on better terms. Let's reimagine our public health infrastructure so that this type of crisis never happens again. There's so many opportunities for renewed multilateral cooperation. And it'll take a level of resources that the current system simply doesn't provide. And so we're calling for really a rethink on those institutions and what they're able to do to prevent future transnational crises like COVID-19. Yeah, yeah. I read a piece, we just talked about it earlier, which I quote to you, and I had to read it probably three times to really get it. You are saying about the multilateral development banks and I quote, they can lend far more if allowed. Based on an independent analysis, these banks could unlock up to a trillion dollars in new lending while still maintaining their AAA ratings. That is, I've never heard that before. Well, these are estimates done by our partners, including the Bank of Italy and so many others. And I think there's broad consensus, frankly, that if the shareholders of the Brenton Woods institutions were willing to, as they've indicated they are now, willing to conduct a capital adequacy review, a lot of experts believe that such a review would show that you could actually achieve much more leverage on the balance sheets of these institutions in a manner that protects their credit rating takes advantage of the current extremely low global interest rate environment and raises resources that are desperately desperately needed to help economies achieve inequitable and green recovery. And just to put it in perspective, rich countries have basically spent 20 to 30%. Our estimate is 24% of their GDP investing in recovery efforts, response and recovery efforts COVID-19. The large emerging markets around the world have spent about 6% and the 70 plus low income countries that are called developing countries have only been able to spend 2% of their GDP in investing in a recovery. What that means is we're gonna have this great divergence and the divergence is gonna be fast growing economies in countries like the United States and Germany that frankly have had access to vaccines and have had big investments in stimulus and recovery and supportive monetary policy actions. And then you're gonna have in 70, 80 countries around the world a prolonged 10 year long economic crisis because they don't have the same access to vaccines. COVID-19 is just taking off in many of these places and causing huge death and devastation in their economy. And on top of that, they don't have the resources to invest in a recovery. So we said, well, what are reasonable ways to generate the trillions of dollars needed to promote an equitable recovery and prevent the next set of crises, namely climate change and future pandemics. And we came up with plans for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, other regional development banks to within their charters, raise the resources necessary and be a huge part of the global solution. But we need that bold leadership and we need it now. Yeah, we need it now. I had a conversation with the UNDP administrator who basically said that at the moment we have 10 rich countries who have 87% of the vaccines. So, and I wonder talking to you and so many willing big organizations and corporations, how is that possible? Yeah, you know, historically, lesser developed countries have lagged wealthy nations in access to vaccines. New vaccines historically would take 18 to 20 years to reach lower income countries at scale. And even with the advent of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and all these big new partnerships that really came to fruition over the last two decades, some of which I helped create in prior roles, even with that, you have a significant lag for new vaccines reaching the bulk of the world's population. And so, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But the problem with that in COVID-19 is so long as COVID is replicating aggressively in Africa, 1.3 billion people, a 2% immunization rate, or in India, another 1.3 billion people, maybe a 15 to 20% immunization rate, but it's unclear whether the vaccine they relied on is going to be robust against some of the new variants. So, what you have is you have these huge pools of viral replication that then present new variants. And these new variants are a threat to the entire global economy and deeply undermine the health of the communities in which people are not vaccinated. So, that's where we are. And we've estimated it'll take $50 billion to solve this problem by the end of 2022 and achieve 70% herd immunity in every country around the world. Half of that is for buying vaccines and half of it's for distributing vaccines. And we've worked with the International Monetary Fund and its shareholders and the World Bank and others to mobilize some of the resources to fill that gap. But it's extraordinary that the world hasn't fully paid for that yet because the $50 billion, it sounds like a lot, but it's nothing compared to the $9 trillion that the IMF estimates will be lost in the global economy by failing to vaccinate low-income country populations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coming back to energy, which is the project because we talk about the energy poverty. You suggest that it is possible to end energy poverty in 10 years, prevent the next pandemic and improve healthcare for all. That sounds fantastic. How can we do that in that short amount of time? Well, I mean, look, the real answer is gonna be leadership and cooperation. If we had the right leadership and cooperation on the platform that Rockefeller, IKEA and some others are pulling together here, we're very confident that we would achieve the goal of making sure everyone on the planet had access to energy by the end of 2030. If you think about it, it's been 100 plus years since we've been providing electrification at scale to our people in countries across the planet. And it's probably a surprise to most people that 800 million people effectively don't have any access to real electricity right now. That's a shocking thing. And then you go and you visit and you say, gosh, you can't use a rice huller, you can't turn lights on and your daughter can't read in the dark, you don't have any kind of business growth capacity and so employment is all in the informal sector. You simply cannot be part of a modern digital economy that's global if you don't have access to electricity. So we should have solved that problem 50 years ago. And the idea that it'll take 10 years to solve it now is one that is really all about leadership, but we've laid out a plan, it's very specific, it's public private, it's based on renewable energy technology and distributed technology. We have the partners lined up and we're gonna get that done with the support of global partners. On preventing the pandemic and the future, I helped lead the Ebola response in West Africa on behalf of the United States and the Obama team back in 2014. Everyone saw coming out of that. There were four major reviews, one hosted of course by Germany, one by the United Nations on which I serve and they all had the same basic vision of how you prevent pandemics. You invest in surveillance and you share the data. You invest in platforms that can rapidly develop vaccines, drugs and diagnostics and you make the outcomes of those investments broadly accessible, widely manufactured and readily available. You have a standing capacity country after country after country to stand up a public health response as soon as you see that a pandemic has hit and you have a coordinating mechanism for the international community to support those nations that are unable to get over the hump on their own. That's basically it. Every one of these reviews says the same thing, same thing after the Zika outbreak in Latin America and parts of the United States. And so now coming out of COVID, we know what needs to happen. The question is, will we have the political leadership to get it done? The Rockefeller Foundation is creating a global collaboration to share data on pandemics so that people are not surprised by epidemics that turn into pandemics but so much more needs to be done. But the roadmap could not be more clear and was clear after Ebola, was clear after Zika, is now clear during COVID-19 and it's upon us to make sure this doesn't happen again. You mentioned the coordinating mechanism. The UN for example has for COVID-19 a program called COVAX and they could have been the coordinating mechanism. However, the political will of the national states wasn't there. It was hardly any financial support coming out so the whole program is actually in jeopardy. How do you, especially now in the Rockefeller Foundation, how do you change political will? Well, part of it is you changed the leaders and frankly, President Biden joined, came on the scene and put America back into the spirit of global cooperation and his administration made a significant immediate investment in COVAX. They started donating actual vaccines on top of that and they have become, they've gone from sort of not participating to being a global leader and encouraging participation. So that's part of the answer. I think another part of the answer is having high aspirations. COVAX as you point out started and they had an immediate goal of getting kind of 20% of the need covered with vaccines that could be financed and procured. And while commendable, that is not gonna get you to the 70% that's required for real herd immunity and protection. So, we worked with all of those partners and now there's this new goal of 70% by the end of 2022, the International Monetary Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation and other observers, including the WHO have helped construct the roadmap of what it will take to get there. And the challenge is now raising the $50 billion required to achieve that goal and recognizing that we are all in this together. You are not safe in Germany, you're not safe in the United States, you're not safe elsewhere unless COVID has been dealt with in places that might be perceived as far away, but for a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 is really not that far away. Yesterday or two days ago, came the new IEA report out the International Energy Agency which set out more than 400 milestones to achieving net zero. And they are quite drastic in their approach. They say these include no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects from now on, for example. We also have the IMF, which has this really radical steps. They are saying by 2030, we need an average global price of $75 per ton of CO2 way up from today's $3 per ton. So there is a massive movement going on, but how optimistic are you that by 2030, we are where we want to be? Well, on the specific question of electrification and energy systems transitions, I am more optimistic. I believe you can embrace what the Rockefeller Foundation is now doing with its partners and similar efforts and basically phase out all the technology that we know is making the earth very unstable from a climate perspective. And it's just not cost competitive with new renewable technology. So for diesel generators, for example, should be a sort of item that you see in a museum because nobody likes them. They're noisy, they're dirty, they're dangerous and they cost a lot to operate relative to low cost distributed renewable options. Similarly, the idea of building massive coal plants, and by the way, the world is in the midst of commissioning and financing 500 gigawatts of new coal, 112 in the 27 countries that are supported by the Chinese Belt Road Initiative, for example, that is the wrong path forward. And that is both more costly and less effective as services to people who don't have electricity access than embracing renewable strategies. So I think I'm pretty confident that the confluence of private sector leadership and public sector recognition and some unique things that civil society and institutions like mine can do will achieve that goal. I'm less confident on the question of carbon pricing. I don't think I've seen yet a viable political path to get a carbon price that is, as pointed out by the IMF and the AEA appropriate to achieve the goals that are sought. So I have a little bit less to say that's optimistic about that at this point. Many business leaders I talked to who managed to steer their companies very successfully through the COVID crisis said that they had started with the transformation many years ago, almost a decade ago, moving away from that short-term shareholder value-sinking towards a long-term and more responsible stakeholder model. So if I look at the Rockefeller Foundation, you are heading a 108-year-old very influential organization funded with oil money. And now you are a fighter for a clean and a healthy planet. Can you talk me through your massive transformation and how did you make it work? Well, I'm a big believer in multi-stakeholder capitalism and in every single individual and institution contributing both to their own bottom line and to the major global goals and standards we have to set, treat your employees well, give them upward economic mobility, invest in efforts that will protect the climate and stop doing things that are now known to be detrimental. The Rockefeller Foundation, as you point out, was based, of course, on the wealth created by John D. Rockefeller Sr. and the Standard Oil Company. And at the same time, we are amongst the first in our industry to disavow investments in fossil fuels. And we announced a year ago an effort to divest from fossil fuel-based businesses and now have as our single greatest programmatic effort around the world, an effort to embrace renewable alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy, especially for the world's poor. That's an example. And we need more institutions to embrace those examples. One of my concerns is that sometimes multi-stakeholder capitalism, which is still sort of early in its manifestation in at least American corporate boardrooms, is too reliant on press releases and statements of intent and still a little bit slow on taking the bold actions required to live up to that standard. And so we encourage others to do so when we try to lead by example when appropriate. Mm-hmm. Which barriers of change did you hit during this time? I'm not sure you were there already, but maybe you do know. Yeah, yeah, no, I was there. And we made it happen, but we hit a lot of barriers. Look, one of the barriers are... There are a lot of people that believe that when you limit your investment horizon, you limit your ability to grow your endowment through the ups and downs of different parts of the public and private capital markets. So I think that is probably the number one challenge you face when you're doing something like making a divestment decision for a large endowed organization. We also... People will also legitimately say that, well, making these actions now is not enough. And I think that's true. I think it's true, it's not enough. That's why we also are spearheading a major effort to change energy transitions all around the world. But a lot of people don't take the first action because they're told, well, it's complicated, it may cost you some money over time, and it's not enough. And those are all reasons we had to sort of fight through and do a lot of learning, a lot of education, a lot of observation of others who had gone down this path before us and observed that, well, they did just fine so we can follow their lead and go ahead and take that path. From what you're saying, I think you did very well. Looking into German boardrooms, for example, many only understand now that their companies need a completely different compass. And especially the car industry, which had failed to make the transition because they probably thought they were too big to fail. So what would be your advice to businesses who want to match the requirements of our time, but perhaps don't know how? Well, I think the first thing you have to do is set the goal. And many companies have now set the goal of net zero by a certain date, often 2050. I think our climate change experts will tell you that that's not enough. You need net zero by much, much, much sooner than that. And in many cases, the way companies set their net zero targets doesn't take adequate account of the impact of their products on the planet. So I think that's really, we need to rethink that and be more aggressive and accelerated around that. The second is, I do think companies across industries and certainly in mobility should look at, what is their core business and what is that business gonna look like 10 years from now or 20 years from now? And it's often the case that a first mover outside of entrenched industrial players, it becomes the innovator. But ultimately you need to see rapid transitions from the bulk of any industry to get the transformation we need. It's certainly true in vehicles and mobility. It's also true in cement. It's true in industrial manufacturing processes, steel and things that people don't necessarily associate as much. Another area where it's critically needed and I don't think folks really appreciate it is in food. Our foundation did an analysis called the true cost of food that found for the United States, the true cost of food is three times that of what consumers pay because of the environmental and health consequences. And frankly, it is up to corporate boardrooms and corporate leaders to internalize these concepts and build businesses that are productive for the bottom line, but also deeply, deeply part of the solution to the health and climate challenges the globe and our populations are facing. Yeah, yeah, because you went now into the food security and the cost. How do we secure food for the future? Well, that's a great question. We have a global food system that even today leaves 270 million people in a situation of literally acute hunger. They don't have enough food today to be somewhat healthy and it leads another 700 plus million people with chronic hunger. They don't, on a regular basis, they experience real and meaningful hunger and it probably leaves another billion or so people in a micronutrient malnourished situation. And then it simultaneously has almost every wealthy economy dealing with the crisis of obesity, which then leads to diabetes and heart disease and all these extraordinary healthcare costs. So we need to change the way we do food systems all around the world. And the Rockefeller Foundation partnered with a group called Lancet and there was an interesting global study of what diets need to look like. People will have to change their diets to have more sustainable and healthier diets and to demand more sustainable and healthier diets. There are going to have to be transitions in the way we do animal agriculture in particular to deal with the huge negative land use and environmental consequences of traditional animal agriculture. And we have to have a much more biodiverse food system. We can't just rely on a handful of mega crops and keep kind of devoting massive amounts of land and production to those mega crops. The good news is, Rockefeller did a global food systems prize and we saw thousands of applicants from around the world come together and say, hey, we have a new vision in our local community, whether it's on a native reservation in the United States or whether it's in Peru or China or parts of Africa, we have a new vision for how we can achieve more sustainability and nutrition in our food system. And that's a signal to me that people are starting to really care. And that's going to be the first big step is caring about the problem. I have a very simple question right now. Many people don't know where to go with their ideas. So you have a lot of startups or young scientists who have fabulous ideas, not wanted in the company or country. And they maybe don't know what you're doing. How can they access you? How can they, I don't know, yeah, approach you? Well, first, I would say, please do approach us. We wanna work with everybody. We have our website is a good place to start. It's www.rockfoundrockfond.org. But that's a great starting spot. But we do like hearing from folks, especially in our core areas of work, energy, food, economic, well-being for those who are vulnerable and health. And in those areas and many others, but really those are big areas of focus, we have the ability to help connect people to partners and sometimes invest directly in their efforts to make sure their ideas do in fact, yield impact for the world. And in fact, over our 100 plus year history, I'd say they're a handful of those types of connections have made all the difference. Well, unfortunately, all the crisis we just talked about, whether it is COVID or food security or energy property climate change, poor countries seem to be always the ones that suffer most because they've been hit hardest. Where in Europe, the awareness that the planet needs to transition or even a reset to survive is not that great. Often business leaders or mainly actually politicians think that climate change is something that had been pushed on top of the agenda. And I wonder how we can raise awareness in which countries and change political will more effectively? Well, I think everyone needs to be more aware of how the consequences of our actions affect each of us and the institutions we are a part of or we have the good fortune to lead. And whether it's floods in Germany or wildfires in the American West, floods in Texas or erratic weather events in the Southeast and the United States, all of these we now know with certainty are much, much, much more frequent because of manmade climate change. And we have an obligation to understand that and an obligation to make sure that we are part of the solution and not the problem. And so when you say, business leaders believe the topic has been sort of forced upon the agenda, well, it should be forced on the agenda. It should be and then leaders should study it and learn it and understand how it intersects with their business and understand how they can position their business so that they're part of the solution and not part of the problem. I mean, there have been some big industries that succeeded for a while by being part of a problem, you know, the tobacco industry. But over time, I think most business leaders would much rather be associated with the solution. And certainly employees and young employees in companies, I think have a strong sense of purpose and what their daily efforts, their contributions to be connected to making the world better and not worse. And I hope they hold their businesses to account often by walking if they don't feel like the values that they uphold are being upheld by their business. And so, yes, business leaders should confront the issue and should have to confront the issue with seriousness and focus. I have two more questions. I hope you are going to go to a couple more minutes left. The IMF was recently talking about that they asked for a just transition within and across countries. How possible is that? How just can our transition be? Well, the transition has to be just. And I think what Christina and Joe David, the IMF was saying was if you look at what everybody predicts will happen without intense involved leadership to change course, we will have this great divergence. Countries that have access to vaccines and access to resources for fiscal stimulus and monetary action will recover rapidly from the pandemic, draw private capital into their economies and lift their people back up quickly. And then 70, 80, 90, 100 countries around the world that don't have access to the vaccines in the same way and don't have access to fiscal stimulus and monetary actions in the same way will be stuck in a decade of divergence. They'll get capital will flow from those countries to the wealthier ones where it's safer and more rewarded. And then that will unwind decades of progress on human development goals and on the basic idea that every human being should be afforded justice and dignity in their life. And so the question is, can we do something about that? Can we change that course? And the Rockefeller team working with so many public and private partners has laid out a very concrete way to change it. Work with the IMF to make special drawing rights an important part of providing liquidity to low income countries. Reimagine the World Bank and the multilateral banking system to provide an additional trillion dollars of lending and liquidity. Work together on public, private platforms like our energy transition platform to bring technology and business know-how and operating capacity and public sector commitment together to lift up a billion people and do it in a climate friendly way and avoid the next pandemic by working together and building out data systems and being prepared for what we know will come. And these are solvable problems and we get to work on a few of them and we get to work with extraordinary partners. But the moment right now to aspire to and achieve a just transition is this moment. And that's why the Rockefeller Foundation made a billion dollar commitment to adjust and green recovery. It's why we urge everyone else to understand this moment matters so much more than five years from now or five years ago. Now is the time to link leadership to adjust transition and make it happen. Dr. Shah, one more question. This podcast is dedicated to the great reset. If you think about, you talked a lot about it now. If you think about the key elements for a successful reset, what are the key elements? Well, the first key element is a recognition that to thrive in the future, to protect our planet, to lift up our vulnerable populations and to create a sense of stability and justice so that everyone can thrive. It requires every part of society being committed to that goal. This is not just a task for a handful of political leaders. It's not just a task for some businesses that happen to have energy sector, food sector exposure. It's not just a task for young people who should be our consciousness and our sense of spirit. It really is everyone. And we need leadership that is inclusive, that is multi-stakeholder, that is willing to bring people together around creative solutions. And that's what I think the moment calls for. That's the single greatest way to achieve a reset that provides for justice, provides for sustainability, and provides for opportunity for all. And I get excited because I see in the partnerships we have a chance to engage in. I see that spirit, whether it's young people or much older corporate board leaders, whether it's heads of state or folks that we support that are out there reaching the last mile and vaccinating those who are difficult to reach. I see that spirit. It's just a matter of lifting it up, honoring it, and making it definitive so that we can achieve a great reset and a green recovery. Lifting it up. Great last words. Thank you very much, Dr. Rachi, president of the Rockefeller Foundation for a really fantastic interview. Thank you very much. Great, thank you. You've been listening to a special English edition of the Gorsa Neustadt, a German podcast series by Zibilla Baden, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who are committed to making our world smarter, greener, and fairer. For more information, please visit www.zibillabaden.com and the official site of the World Economic Forum.